by Arana, Marie
When the ship pulled into harbor, Joaquín de Mier was there to greet it, his face a mask of alarm. The dread author of the war to the death had been reduced to a human cinder; the only sign of life, as far as the Spaniard could see, was the fevered eyes—black as onyx—still smoldering in the meager frame. The officers lowered Bolívar from the ship’s deck in a cradle of locked hands. With infinite care, they laid him on a pallet, then carried him off to the stately old mansion that housed the Spanish consulate. There, on that tiny patch of Spain—as ironic a destination as an American hero might imagine—he was received with the utmost courtesy and consideration.
Alejandro Révérend, the doctor whom Montilla had engaged to care for the ailing Liberator, took careful notes of the occasion:
His excellency arrived in Santa Marta at seven thirty in the evening and, unable to walk at all, came to shore in a chair of human arms. I found him in the following state: extremely thin, exhausted, pained expression, high-strung. Hoarse voice; profound cough, producing a thick, green sputum. Even, but rapid pulse. Labored digestion. The patient exhibited considerable suffering. In sum, His Excellency’s illness struck me as most grave, and my immediate impression was that his lungs were sadly damaged. In Barranquilla, he had been given little more than a few tablespoons of cough syrup.
For the next few days, Révérend cared for him, securing a second opinion from a United States naval surgeon, whose ship, by chance, had dropped anchor in Santa Marta. The American surgeon corroborated Révérend’s diagnosis: the Liberator’s illness was largely in his lungs, most probably tuberculosis.
With every day, Bolívar’s condition grew more dire. He was jaundiced, hardly able to sleep more than two hours at a time; at night, he was feverish, delirious; come morning, he was seized by nausea. His bones ached. His scrawny frame, reduced to less than eighty pounds, shook with coughs or occasional fits of hiccups. He was, as victims of tuberculosis can be, grizzled, balding, shriveled: ancient before his time. Five days later, Révérend decided to transport him in a comfortable sedan to Mier’s sugar plantation, where, at the very least, Bolívar would be in more pleasant surroundings, surrounded by an attentive staff.
At first, Mier’s splendid estate at San Pedro Alejandrino seemed to be just the cure that Bolívar needed. The house was bright, open, with large windows that welcomed fresh breezes from the sea. Palm trees and tamarinds swayed gently in the adjacent gardens. Under a warm sun and a vaulting blue sky, the patient’s spirits rose. The sweet fragrance of sugar invaded his senses. It was an aroma he knew well, having grown up on a sugarcane plantation in San Mateo. As he lay in a hammock strung between two tamarind trees, he may well have remembered the hewn cane, the mashed pulp, the black pits of sorghum that perfumed his childhood. He gained a little energy, wrote a few remarkably eloquent letters. Sometime before, he had sent word to Manuela, beseeching her to come. Where was she?
More visitors arrived: couriers bursting with news, a solemn bishop, a crisply efficient notary public, generals and colonels eager to see their hero. The officers made themselves comfortable. They played cards, drank rum, hired musicians to raise the fading Liberator’s spirits. Rolling cigars, puffing on pipes, they smoked until the corridors were hung with gray. When the stench of one general was so noxious that Bolívar asked him to move back his chair, the man was taken aback. “Excuse me, Your Excellency, I don’t think I’ve soiled myself!” “Not at all,” Bolívar said, “it’s just that you smell like hell.” The general laughed and replied that Bolívar would have never said such a thing to Mistress Manuela, whose love of tobacco was well known. Bolívar’s face was suddenly filled with infinite sadness. His eyes welled with tears. “Ah, Manuela,” he said. “Very well.”
Sometime later, when Dr. Révérend was at his side, Bolívar took it upon himself to ask, “Doctor, what brought you to these parts?” “Liberty,” the doctor answered. “And have you found it?” Bolívar queried. “Yes, my General.” “Well, then,” Bolívar sighed, “you are more fortunate than I. Go back to your beautiful France . . . eventually you’ll find that life is impossible here, with so many sons of bitches.”
By the night of December 9, he was feverish again, raving. The last, fatal seizures of consumption took grip of his bony frame. When he came to his senses the next morning, the bishop pressed him to take his last sacraments; General Montilla, beside himself with grief, pleaded with him to put his house in order, make a will. Bolívar balked at first. Accustomed to fight, he was not prepared for surrender. “How will I ever get out of this labyrinth?” he cried out in dismay. But as the day wore on, he saw the sense in it. With friends at his side as witnesses, he commended his soul to God, declared the long-dead Teresa del Toro his lawfully wedded wife, and avowed that he had no descendants. For all the dozens of mistresses he had romanced in the past, for all the love he had professed to Manuela and Pepita, his bid to posterity confirmed what he had sworn as a young man: no woman would ever take Teresa’s place. He had buried his baptismal garments with her body and fulfilled his vows to the church. The rest was a matter of earthly cargo. He bequeathed 8,000 pesos (from the pension he had yet to receive) to his lifelong servant José Palacios, his disputed property in Venezuela to his two sisters, his most valuable books to the University of Caracas, his sword to Sucre’s wife. That night, he received last rites from a humble Indian priest who had been called from a neighboring village. Those rituals done, he turned his remaining strength to address his countrymen one last time. The notary took down his final words:
Colombians! You have witnessed my efforts to launch liberty where tyranny once reigned. I have labored selflessly, sacrificing my fortune and my peace of mind. When it became clear that you doubted my motives, I resigned my command. My enemies have toyed with your confidence, destroyed what I hold sacred—my reputation, my love of liberty. They have made me their victim and hounded me to my grave. I forgive them.
As I depart your midst, my love for you impels me to make known my last wishes. I aspire to no other glory than the consolidation of Colombia. . . . My last vote is for the happiness of our native land. If my death can heal and fortify the union, I go to my tomb in peace.
As Bolívar’s companions gathered around his bed, the notary read out those last lines. The Liberator was a living ghost—he could hardly keep his eyes open, hardly talk, hardly breathe—but his mind was clear enough to grasp that his words had made an impression: in that circle of hard-bitten soldiers, there was scarcely a dry eye.
A man could do little more but die. And so it came to be. Within hours, he was weaving in and out of delirium. His urine burned, doubling him over with pain; his hands and feet were as cold as the Andean snow. His pulse galloped; he passed blood, and then he started to babble incoherently. “José!” he called out, “Let’s go! Let’s go! They don’t want us! Take my luggage on board!” In time, he lost the ability to form words at all. When asked whether he was in pain, he seemed to be signaling no. Six days passed in this harrowing limbo.
At noon on December 17, the strange wheeze that was coming from his chest gave way to desperate gasps. Life would not depart Bolívar’s body easily. But there was no mistaking it: he was taking his last, deep gulps of mortality. Something about that urgent rattle startled Dr. Révérend. He called the men from the room next door. “Gentlemen, if you want to be present for the Liberator’s last breath and his final hour,” he said, “come now.” They filed in quickly, somberly. At one o’clock in the afternoon, exactly eleven years to the minute after his famed declaration of independence in Angostura, Bolívar’s soul passed from his shattered body. His lips went white, his brow softened in beatific repose.
Bolívar was dead, Greater Colombia was gone, and the dream he had held so dear slipped imperceptibly into the vast hereafter. But there was no question about the triumph: Six new nations—Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Bolivia, and Peru—would emerge one by one to confirm it.
Epilogue
Only after Bolívar was dea
d and gone did his legend take root and grow. Few heroes have been so exalted by history, so venerated around the world, so memorialized in marble. In time, the rancor that dogged his last days became rampant adulation.
But that reversal—perhaps unique in the annals of history—was slow to come. As life ebbed and the corpse grew cold, only the loyal were there to mourn him. Bolívar died reviled, misunderstood, slandered in every republic he had liberated. For all the wealth into which he had been born, he died a pauper. For all the treasuries he had commanded, he had eschewed financial reward. He departed this life penniless, powerless, dispossessed. Driven from Bogotá, loathed by Peru, yearning to return to his beloved Caracas, he soon found that even his native land had barred his homecoming. He died mourned by only a few: his manservant, his stalwart lieutenants, his sisters, his brother’s son, a scattering of friends. There was scant sympathy otherwise. “Goodbye to the spirit of evil!” the governor of Maracaibo crowed—“the author of all misfortune, the tyrant of the fatherland!” Twelve years passed before Bolívar’s bones were carried home to Caracas in triumph.
As three rounds of cannon fire sounded from a nearby fort, marking the Liberator’s passing, his doctor, the town pharmacist Révérend, undertook to perform an autopsy. From the cadaver’s discoloration, the choked lungs, pronounced tubercles, advanced atrophy, he could draw but one conclusion: Bolívar had died of acute pulmonary failure, most likely tuberculosis. After working all night to embalm him, the doctor met light of day with one more responsibility. There was no one else to dress the dead man; no garment available but the shabby tunic in which he had died. A clean shirt had to be borrowed from a kind neighbor, after which some semblance of a funeral was arranged and paid for by a volunteer.
On December 20, 1830, the Liberator’s corpse was transported from public view at the customhouse to the cathedral, some blocks away. A modest procession wended its way through the sleepy streets of Santa Marta. Bells tolled, a requiem was sung, but no important officials were there to hear them. The bishop of Santa Marta, who had fallen ill days before, did not preside over the Mass. Bolívar’s remains were deposited in a tomb within the cathedral walls, and there they lay as Greater Colombia fell to pieces, the continent spun into petty wars, and Bolívar’s generals scrambled to advance self-important visions. Within months, Bolívar’s nemesis José Antonio Páez was elected president in Venezuela. General Urdaneta, who had lobbied to make Bolívar king, was toppled ignominiously in Bogotá. General Santander, in exile for the attempted assassination, was brought back to rule independent Colombia. General Flores, wanting more elbow room for Ecuador, prepared a flank attack on the parent republic. Panama, trying to declare itself a republic, looked around anxiously for a leader. Bolivia, under Andrés Santa Cruz, struggled to surmount the chaos. And Peru—the anxious heart of a lapsed empire—proceeded to have twenty presidents in the next twenty years. But, for all that, the Liberator’s paramount achievement was irreversible: the Spaniards never returned.
The news of Bolívar’s death—like all news in those distant days—was slow to spread through the Americas. Manuela had been making her way upriver toward him, confident that rumors of his decline were exaggerations, when she was stopped cold by a letter from Perú de Lacroix: “Allow me, esteemed madam, to weep with you over the immense loss you have suffered along with the rest of the nation. Prepare yourself for a final death notice.” She was taken aback, momentarily unhinged. Somehow, she got hold of a venomous snake and put it to her throat, but it sank its fangs into her arm instead. When she recovered, she regained her rock-hard determination. “I loved the Liberator when he was alive,” she wrote General Flores. “Now that he is dead, I worship him.” Less than two years later, Santander—back in power—packed her off to foreign shores.
She sailed to Jamaica, then Guayaquil, but her passport was revoked along the way and so she landed in Paita, a tiny fishing village on the coast of Peru, where the only wayfarers were Yankee whalers. Undaunted, striving to make the best of a bad situation, she took over an abandoned house not far from the wharf and hung a sign over her door: “Tobacco. English Spoken. Manuela Sáenz.” For a modest fee, she offered to write letters on behalf of illiterate sailors. She prepared and sold sweets, embroidered linens, and, one way or another, managed to eke out a meager living. But she lived in virtual poverty for the rest of her days, visited from time to time by such eminences as the Italian military hero Giuseppe Garibaldi, or the celebrated Peruvian writer Ricardo Palma. As years went by, she learned that her husband, James Thorne, had been murdered along with his mistress as they strolled through the sugar fields, not far from Lima. There were perhaps many reasons why. Thorne had had numerous mistresses and illegitimate children since Manuela had left him. At the very end of her life, Sáenz was joined by Simón Rodríguez, Bolívar’s teacher, who arrived in Paita when he was eighty, destitute, and more than a little touched by madness. He limped off a boat in 1853 and died the following year. Manuela died two years later. We can only imagine the conversations between those feisty old revolutionaries who loved Bolívar above all men.
Dead, Bolívar became less man than symbol. As the years went by—as chaos continued to plague the region—South Americans recalled the extraordinary feat of freeing so many nations in so dire a time. His failures as a politician receded. His successes as a liberator took center stage. Indeed, the accomplishments were irrefutable. It was he who had disseminated the spirit of the Enlightenment, brought the promise of democracy to the hinterlands, opened the minds and hearts of Latin Americans to what they might become. It was he who, with a higher moral instinct than even Washington or Jefferson, saw the absurdity of embarking on a war for liberty without first emancipating his own slaves. It was he who had led the armies, slept on the ground with his soldiers, fretted about their horses, their bullets, their maps, their blankets—inspired men to unimaginable heroism. Revolutionaries called for him in Mexico, Chile, Cuba, Argentina. He rode, “fighting all the way,” as Thomas Carlyle put it, “more miles than Ulysses ever sailed. Let the coming Homers take note of it!” Never before in the history of the Americas had one man’s will transformed so much territory, united so many races. Never had Latin America dreamed so large.
But in the course of forging a new world, compromises had been made. More than once, Bolívar found himself tossing ideals by the wayside. As he rode through the roiling hell of a brutal war, through the abattoirs of improvised military justice, he didn’t always have the luxury of employing the principles he so eloquently espoused. From time to time he made questionable decisions. Bolívar’s critics are quick to cite them: The decree of a war to the death, for instance, with which he meant to shock and awe the colonizer. The execution of General Piar, a young, ambitious patriot who, Bolívar suspected, was trying to incite a race war under his very nose. The massacre of eight hundred Spanish prisoners at Puerto Cabello, which seemed expeditious at the time, as a prison uprising was feared and there were insufficient guards to contain them. The betrayal of his aging fellow liberator, Francisco Miranda, who, according to Bolívar, had lacked courage, capitulated too easily, and sold out the revolution to Spain. Last, and certainly not least, was Bolívar’s exercise of dictatorial powers.
He had good arguments for all of it. There was, to begin, a continent’s staggering ignorance, the result of conditions under which it had labored for hundreds of years. In his darkest hours, Bolívar wondered whether his America was truly ready for democracy. There was, too, the swift, draconian response Spain let loose on revolutionaries. After the Napoleonic Wars, the madre patria emerged fiercer, more terrible—more sharpened by combat—than the patriots could have anticipated. Violence was met by ever more violence, and soon escalation became the only rule of war. The result was a bloody conflict that wiped whole cities from the map, reduced civilian populations by a third, and virtually obliterated Spain’s expeditionary forces.
Bolívar was a master of improvisation, a military commander who could outw
it, outride, and outfight a vastly more powerful enemy. But that very talent, that genius for moving swiftly from strategy to strategy—for rebounding quickly, for making decisions on the fly—had its liabilities in times of peace. It is difficult to build a democracy on a wartime model. It was why he made hasty decisions, last-ditch promises, political blunders. It was why he pardoned Páez. It was why he mishandled Santander. It was why he tried to patch his way through the labyrinths of political process, saying different things to different men.
But, for all his flaws, there was never any doubt about his power to convince, his splendid rhetoric, his impulse to generosity, his deeply held principles of liberty and justice. As the years went by and South Americans remembered that greatness, they understood that their Liberator had been ahead of his time. Leaders who followed seemed wanting in comparison, dwarfed by the shadow of a colossus. Venezuelans were appalled that they had allowed their most distinguished citizen to die in penury, in another country, forbidden even to come home. Colombians recalled that it was on their soil that he had begun his march to freedom. Ecuadorians, Bolivians, Panamanians, Peruvians began to revive the legend. Cities and provinces took his name. Public plazas raised monuments to his victories. In marble or bronze, Bolívar’s flesh took on a serenity it never had in life. The restless, fevered Liberator was now the benevolent father, devoted teacher, good shepherd striving to build a better flock. Astride a horse, galloping into an eternal void, the enduring image was complete: here was a vigorous life, lived in a single trajectory, aiming to forge a people, a continent. America.